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OAC PRESS Working Paper Series #18 SSN (Print) No Collar, No Master: Workers and Animals in the Modernization of Rio de Janeiro Nádia Farage University of Campinas 2013 Nádia Farage Open Anthropology Cooperative Press This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit 1 This paper is part of a work in progress, on libertarian naturism and anti-vivisection ideas in modern Brazil, granted by FAPESP, the Research Foundation of the State of São Paulo. I thank my students and my colleagues, Sidney Chalhoub and Mauro Almeida, for their useful comments. My special thanks to Derek Matyszak for assistance in the English version. 1 At the beginning of January 1904, a note in the Rio de Janeiro newspaper A Nação reported that there had been gunfire at a city slaughterhouse and a circus. 2 A laconic note that might have passed unnoticed were it not for the intriguing connection it establishes, at first sight, between disparate locations. The link between the two is the presence of animals and, from this perspective, the note is an invitation, which I take up here, to reflect upon the codification of the presence of animals in town and the consequent political conflicts during the urban reform of the Brazilian federal capital, Rio de Janeiro, in the first decade of the twentieth century. Epidemic outbreaks of yellow fever and smallpox throughout the nineteenth century and the black plague at the start of the twentieth, ravaged the port of Rio de Janeiro, resulting in heavy losses to commerce, most notably to coffee exports. In addition to this, in the eyes of the intellectual elite, Rio de Janeiro with its narrow streets, colonial houses and ridden with epidemics epitomised the backwardness of the country. Reacting to this, the newly established Republic aimed to reform the capital following the model of Paris and, more closely, that of Buenos Aires in order to make it attractive for foreign investment. To further this goal, the federal government designated engineer Francisco Pereira Passos as the mayor of the city and physician Oswaldo Cruz as Director of Hygiene, who had recently arrived from Paris, enthused with Pasteurian theory. Under the direction of both, the rebuilding of the central and port areas of the city was accompanied by sanitary measures to prevent epidemics. While the mayor ordered the old colonial town to be destroyed an authoritarian process which the local population, the cariocas, captured in the expression bota-abaixo or take it down hygiene officials entered the slums and fumigated or burned the few belongings of the poor. The whole set of measures - very problematic in terms of constitutional rights - was contemporaneously described as sanitary despotism. In the last few decades, this process has been a topic of interest to historiography, which has emphasised the sanitisation of society. 3 However, this historiography tells very little about the impact of the sanitisation process on the animal population, which was also gravely affected. As microbes or bacteria entered the popular imaginary, so, conversely, cows, pigs, dogs and other species were, from that moment, expelled from urban space and rendered invisible to urban dwellers. The sanitary model, which came into being at the start of the twentieth century, would 2 A Nação, January 10, Benchimol, Jaime L. Pereira Passos, um Haussmann tropical: a renovação urbana da cidade do Rio de Janeiro no inicio do seculo XX. Rio de Janeiro: Departamento Geral de Documentação e Informação Cultural, 1992; Chalhoub, Sidney. Cidade Febril: cortiços e epidemias no Rio de Janeiro Imperial. São Paulo: Cia das Letras, 1999; Bahia Lopes, Myriam. O Rio em movimento: quadros médicos e(m) história, Rio de Janeiro: Fiocruz, 2000; Sevcenko, Nicolau. A revolta da vacina: mentes insanas em corpos rebeldes. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, persist thereafter and, in its most aggressive form, would regulate the lives of animals, conceiving of them as commodities the surfeit of which would be disposable in the modern city. Intruders they would be, co-dwellers never more. The rebuilding of Rio de Janeiro was thus a crucial moment in the establishment of a biopolitics and, for this reason, it constitutes a strategic locus by which the political and ontological disputes around the correlate definitions of animal and human in Brazilian modernity can be envisaged. Animal co-dwellers: a sketch K. Thomas classic study 4 delineates the gradual movement in England, from the end of the nineteenth to the first decades of the twentieth century, which created the conditions for the subsequent industrial production of animals. Notably, it was due to the expulsion of stock-rearing farms and slaughterhouses to the outskirts of the cities, which veiled the suffering and death of animals from urban sensibilities. 5 As C. Lévi-Strauss 6 pointed out some time ago, social distance constitutes the symbolic operator by which the animal is transformed into an anonymous multiplicity, exactly describing the condition of animals in modern industrial societies, in sharp contrast to the domestic rearing of animals, which is based upon dense social relations between human and animal. Such a transition can be detected in the context of the Rio de Janeiro of the beginning of the century. A brief examination of the press of those years presents a picture of a town populated by varied species of animals, mostly domestic ones: advertisements in the newspapers reveal houses with pastures in residential areas, coach houses, barns and widespread urban trade in milking cows and their calves, pigs, chicken, ducks or birds. This can be seen, for example, in the advertisements of the daily Correio da Manhã in the beginning of the year 1903: For sale a heifer, first pregnancy two months ago, very cheap. Contact at Catumby St, 5. [...] For sale a small donkey, young and very tame. It is perfect. Price 140$000. Frei Caneca St, Thomas, Keith. O homem e o mundo natural: mudanças de atitude em relação às plantas e os animais, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, See also Lansbury, Coral. The old brown dog: women, workers and vivisection in Edwardian England. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, Lévi-Strauss, Claude. O Pensamento Selvagem. São Paulo: Cia Ed.Nacional, 1976; see also Fontenay, Elisabeth, de. Le silence de bêtes: la philosophie à l epreuve de l animalité. Paris: Fayard, Correio da manhã, January 3, Or, For sale excellent cows, Cerqueira Lima St, 24, Riachuelo station. For sale a beautiful dapple-grey horse, a young pacer. Contact at Dias da Cruz St, 35, Meyer. For sale a Zebu ox, to see and contact at Botafogo Beach, 170, hotel. 8 It is also necessary to mention dogs and donkeys, especially the latter, worked to complete exhaustion in public transport systems and constantly replaced. 9 In addition, there were worn out cattle that crossed the town to die in the urban slaughterhouses, the cirques and even sporadic bullfighting 10 in the residential area of Laranjeiras: Tauromachy: It will be the last of the season, the bullfighting announced for tomorrow, in the bull ring at Larangeiras. The funds will be for the charity benefit of the Asylum of N. S. Auxiliadora. The public, for sure, will not leave an empty seat in the bull arena. 11 Large houses in residential areas were often advertised as including pasture for grazing, for example: For sale [...] 22$000 a house with many rooms in the centre of a expansive property, just two minutes from the Engenho Novo station [...] On the property there are many fruit trees and pasture for three or four animals [...] 12 And, in order to get a plausible image of the presence of animals in town the sight of the continuous flight of insects 13 on the meat exhibited for sale at the streets must also be mentioned. When raising so-called farm animals in town was forbidden in January 1903, a significant number of accusations and complaints was presented to the Municipality targeting piggeries, barnyards, and coach houses in residential areas of the town. 14 Although the complaints may have 8 Correio da manhã, January 4, Pereira Passos, Francisco Pereira Passos, Francisco. Mensagens do Prefeito lidas na Sessão do Conselho Municipal. Rio de Janeiro:Typographia da Gazeta de Notícias, Bullfighting and other animal fights for public entertainment were forbidden in Brazil by Federal Decree n , in Correio da manhã, January 3-4, Correio da manhã, January 8, Pereira Passos, Francisco. Mensagens do Prefeito lidas na Sessão do Conselho Municipal. Rio de Janeiro, Typographia da Gazeta de Notícias, 1903,7. 14 Livro de Queixas e Reclamações da Municipalidade do Rio de Janeiro, ms Arquivo da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, 4 veiled existing quarrels between neighbours, they are still telling of the conspicuous presence of animals in town. Indeed, besides the obvious exploitation of animal labor, which fed and moved the town, we can assume that the co-residence and social proximity of animals made it difficult to reduce them, in their condition and being, solely to commodities. This is manifest in the touching description of the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro by the Brazilian writer Lima Barreto in early 1900: The most distant streets from the line of the Central Railway are full of patches of grass and weed, on which families place clothes to bleach under the sun. From morning to evening, the terrain is populated by all kinds of small domestic animals: hens, ducks, teals, goats, sheep and pigs, not to mention dogs which fraternise with all of them. In the evening, from every gate sounds a gathering call : Mimoso! An owner calls her goat. Sereia! It is a sow that a child beckons home, and so on. Sheep, goats, teals, hens, turkeys all enter through the front door, cross the length of the house and retire to the backyard. 15 Lima Barreto witnessed precisely the multifold process which initiated the forced decline of domestic animal rearing, expelling animals from Rio s urban space, as well as the state-sponsored systematic extermination of undesirable animals. Following Foucault, 16 it would be a truism to point out that the definition of undesirable was informed by linkages of the modern medical-sanitary project and the architectural plans for the city: as a necessary correlate, the new aesthetics had a new ethical codification, which aimed to create a clean social space. The pest and the stray At the outset was the battle against flies, which had been targeted as transmitters of yellow fever. In a chronicle of 1903, Lima Barreto 17 satirized the campaign, by investing the fly with a narrative voice to describe its fatal encounter with a young dandy physician with thick black hair a caricature of Oswaldo Cruz who, tormented by a fly for one night, had sworn eternal revenge against the species. Indeed, the campaign against yellow fever was understood as a war, which was mirrored in the vocabulary used to refer to it: as mentioned before, anti-fly squads were organized Lima Barreto, A.H. Clara dos Anjos, Prosa Seleta. (1904) Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar, 2001, Foucault, Michel. Vigiar e Punir: nascimento da prisão. Petrópolis: Vozes, Lima Barreto, A. H. Memórias de um stegomya fasciata. (1903) In Toda Crônica. Edited by Beatriz Resende & Rachel Valença, vol. I: Rio de Janeiro: Agir, 2004, to fumigate all the slums, pensions and dwellings of the poor in central areas of the city. At the same time, due to the black plague, a program aimed at exterminating rats and mice was put in place. Oswaldo Cruz had previously tested his techniques to combat the plague in the port of Santos between 1899 and According to his own report, he adopted the same technique deployed by the Americans in Philippines, which encouraged the population to hunt rats and mice. 18 The Hygiene Directory offered a small sum of money as an incentive for each animal delivered. The purchase of rats and mice by the State, although viewed with suspicion by the population, 19 actively engaged the poor quarters of the city. However, this trade in rodents left space for private rearing and brokers: a broker from the nearby town of Niterói became sadly famous for charging the Municipality the then significant sum of 8,000 Réis for the delivery of a consignment of mice. 20 As early as February 1903, critical references to the bio-medical combat against mice, and the corresponding experimental bacteriological research on the plague, appear in the carnival parade: in a masquerade ball hosted by Lucinda Theatre, a guinea pig and two rats were mixed in among the clowns and Adonis and Venus callipygia. 21 The carnival of 1904 took up the topic again with its polka Rato-Rato (Rat-Rat), which was a big hit that year. A rough translation of the lyrics is as follows: Rat, rat, rat For what reason did you gnaw my kist? You, insolent and malevolent rascal Rat, rat, rat I shall see your last day Will the trap haunt you And satisfy my want Who conceived of you? No other than the devil, you d better believe it! Who gave you life? It was a mother-in-law at death s door Who created you? 18 Cruz, Oswaldo G. Relatorio acerca da Molestia Reinante em Santos, apresentado pelo Dr Oswaldo Gonçalves Cruz a S.Ex. o Sr Ministro da Justiça e Negócios Interiores. Opera Omnia, Rio de Janeiro: Imp. Brasileira, Farage, Nádia. De ratos e outros homens: resistência biopolítica no Brasil moderno. In Manuela Carneiro da Cunha: o lugar da cultura e o papel da antropologia. Edited by Lépine, Claude et al, Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Beco do Azougue, Alencar, Edigar de. O carnaval carioca através da música. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Freitas Bastos, 1965, Rio Nu. February 25, It was revenge, I guess Rat, rat, rat Messenger of the Jew When the trap is sprung You, cowardly monster, Do not come with your kikiki, please Old, impudent gnawing rat Old rat, you horrify me I will show you I am wicked My pence is guaranteed I will never release you, no matter what. The polka was apparently inspired by the jota de las ratas movement of the famous satiric zarzuela La Gran Via (1886, by the Spanish maestros Villaverde and Chuenca), which referred to the opening of an avenue in Madrid, displacing thieves, sailors and rats. Irreverent, with an offensive anti-semitic reference, the polka Rato-Rato simultaneously mocked both the rats and the Government. The pipe and chorus parodied the peculiar sound of the animals as well as the call of the mice brokers in the streets. One may note that the polka does not make any reference to the disease brought by the rats, but only to the losses caused by mice as co-dwellers For what reason do you gnaw my kist? The mice hunt is an act of counter-revenge, but the animal - the child of revenge, the malevolence of the mother-in-law and of the devil - turns to be, at the same time, a commodity: My pence is guaranteed, I will never release you, no matter what. No debate on the matter is allowed; useless would be the protest, the kikiki of the rat. Indeed, a pragmatic agreement appears to be established between the scientific and popular conceptions of the rat, settling upon a common meaning, although based on different motives, for the notion of a pest animal. Furthermore, the State s battle against flies or rats was triggered by a demographic calculus, as the priority target for sanitary control was the quantity of animals - further mediated by invisible legions of microbes or bacteria. The war waged against animals was constantly mocked in the press, as can be seen in the satirical newspaper Rio Nu: 22 Public Health, with the new regulations, will comprise a division consisting of three brigades: killing flies, killing mice and killing dogs, all of them commanded by Dr. O. 22 Rio Nu. January 9, Cruz in the post of general. The Ministry of War is astonished 23 This scornful note makes a point, however, about the alignment of the animals targeted for elimination it highlights the link established by demography. Indeed, it seems that it is the countless number of animals which equalises different species and different inter-species relationships in the same classificatory position of pest. This is the route through which the elimination or expulsion process reached the domestic animals, those socially closer species which D. Haraway has rather optimistically designated as companion species. 24 The reality is that from 1903 on, the demographic control of animal population in the streets be they rats, dogs or cows was, significantly, the responsibility of the Public Cleansing Department. The regulation of the presence of animals in urban space was not a unique initiative of the Republican period. Indeed, a municipal by-law of September 11, 1838, 25 had already set up detailed laws on the movement of cattle, their slaughter and commerce in fresh meat, as well as the movement of horses and donkeys. The same by-law forbade the rearing of pigs and goats in yards, and dogs from wandering the streets. In 1892, the Municipality of Rio de Janeiro addressed the issue of dogs once more making their registration obligatory: unaccompanied dogs should be collected by the Municipality and sent to scientific laboratories for experiments. 26 The very notion of the stray, as one can see, emerged from these rules and political practices. The law was never enforced, however, during the nineteenth century. It was the project of urban renewal, which consolidated the modern ethical project that created the conditions that led to the fulfillment of the legislation s attempt. New customs, old laughter Nicknamed the Perfect a good-humoured corruption of the Portuguese prefeito ( prefect, or more correctly, mayor) Pereira Passos passed legislation governing animals as one of his first acts of governance on January 6, There s nothing like a Kings Day to start a career of a vice-king, opined a lettre d un missiu to the mayor in intentionally broken French. 27 The decree of 6 th of January, 1903 included amendments to the Code of 1838 that prescribed the rearing, the transit and the commercialization of animals, dead or alive, in town. Thus, the 23 Rio Nu. January 9, Haraway, Donna. The companion species manifesto: dogs, people and significant otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, In Código de Posturas, Leis, Decretos e Editaes da Intendência Municipal do Distrito Federal, Rio de Janeiro, Papelaria e Typographia Mont Alverne. 26 Jornal do Commercio. August 25, Rio Nu. January 7, movement of cows in urban areas, and door-to-door milking, which was a customary practice of the time, were forbidden: (...) I also abolished the rustic practice of milking cows in public streets, as the cows were covering the paths with their dejecta, scenes that certainly no one will judge proper to a civilized city (...) 28 Furthermore, the new regulations controversially prescribed that Hygiene Officers inoculate cattle against tuberculosis and the inspection of livestock, be it for milk or slaughter. In the case of milk, the regulations aimed to avoid its adulteration with water a practice that the newspaper Rio Nu playfully said to be homeopathic dynamisation. This was also done to prevent commerce in milk from cows affected by tuberculosis, of which there were a considerable number at the time. The obligatory sanitary inspection of slaughterhouses aimed to both control cattle diseases and to prevent the deterioration of meat sold by street vendors. The regulations which prescribed the inspection of live animals on government premises gave rise to long judicial disputes with private slaughterhouses. Nevertheless, the official statistics 29 demonstrate that cattle failed to pass the inspections not so much to transmissible diseases, but due to malnutrition or traumas from long trips on foot or in closed train wagons with no food or water for days, 30 as they often came from dista

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